NorthEast United FC head coach Cesar Farias was all praise for his players following a 2-0 win in their 2015 Hero Indian Super League encounter against Mumbai City FC at the Indira Gandhi Stadium in Guwahati on Friday evening. With the three points from the match, the Highlanders moved up to fourth in the points table and brought themselves back in the semi-final reckoning. When asked to comment on his team’s fighting spirit, the Venezuelan said:

“This is a circumstance when you’ve got a team living in a hotel for four months together and they see each other at breakfast, lunch and dinner. This circumstance is very unique and very uncommon in the world of football. When you are in the national team, maybe you concentrate for 10 days. Usually teams get breaks to go see their families, maybe over the weekend. But this situation as I stated earlier allows us to develop a very cohesive group. This team is very strong, in the locker room this team is very united. We are ready for the ups but we are also ready for the downs.”

Farias made seven changes to the team that had lost to Kerala Blasters FC 4-1. Andre Bikey was restored to his centre-back position and he was very impressive. His decision of bringing on Simao and Nicolas Velez was also spot on as the duo provided plenty of energy towards the end. When asked whether he will be using the same tactic in the remaining matches, Farias said: “I let the press talk about the names of the players, I talk about the team. We have a team. We work with the team and that’s stronger than any individual. If you see the line-up against Kolkata or the line-ups we used in the games we won, then you can see that those line-ups were different than this one. We can’t take the credit away from the players.

“We know that the players are not robots, the players are human beings and we have to understand that that they can’t just run a full match every day. We have to do some changes which is necessary. We had certain objectives set up for us when the season started, two of which we have achieved. We have won more games than the last year and we have more points than the last year and we now have the possibility to make it to semis. The team is above everybody, it’s not the individual, it’s the team, and the most important thing is our performance as a team.”